Insurgency and Terrorism: Need for New Thinking, War on Terror, NewAgeIslam.com

War on Terror

Insurgency and Terrorism: Need for New Thinking

By Raghu Raman

13 April 2010

With conventional methods failing against insurgency and terrorism, there is a need for new thinking

The global war on terror offers opportunities for imbibing lessons that other countries have learnt at high costs—often paid for in blood. The last decade of anti-terror and anti-insurgency operations conducted the world over offers valuable insights for the conduct of such operations in the future.

Historically, conflicts have had four distinct eras. After World War II, there was a race to achieve arms superiority, culminating in the nuclear détente between two superpowers and the other members of the nuclear club. The next era of the Cold War saw the superpowers’ ideologies being played out in proxy wars all over the globe. The third era was a variation of the arms race, but backed by economic power. During this, the US, under Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” programme, broke the Soviet Union’s back by upping the economic ante so high that the Soviets couldn’t afford to stay in the game. The emerging doctrine at the end of this era was that strength ruled the world. Conventional, nuclear and economic supremacy was the strategy that guaranteed security and safety. Photo: AFP

Though India faced challenges of secessionism, insurgency and terrorism virtually since its independence, much of the world’s attention was occupied by the US-Soviet conflict. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, terrorism and guerrilla warfare started occupying global centre stage. And while this was a game changer, the Western world relegated it to a Third World or West Asia problem.

http://newageislam.com/insurgency-and-terrorism--need-for-new-thinking/war-on-terror/d/2745

Military power only one of the many tools to deal with Islamic Radicalization, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Military power only one of the many tools to deal with Islamic Radicalization

John Burns Q. and A. on Islamic Radicalization

By John F. Burns

January 21, 2010

Why would a group of young Middle Eastern Muslims, many of them with good educations, promising futures and the opportunity to benefit in their travels from much that is best in the life of the West, want to leave such a terrible mark in history? What passion so great, what commitment of faith and unreason so immutable, what cast of mind so hostile to gentleness and compassion, could drive 19 young men to commit such appalling acts of mass murder, extinguishing their own lives in the process?

Millions of words have been written in search of answers since that day, and the days of extremist horror that have followed in Baghdad, Bali, Istanbul, Kabul, London, Madrid and elsewhere; so many that I fear that there is little new or insightful anyone can contribute at this remove to the understanding of Islamic extremism that is now so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of the West. As a reporter, I, like so many others, have had personal exposure to the world of violence and intolerance engendered by the extremists, through a decade and more of assignments to places where their hatred of the West took its most dramatic form – the rise of the Talibanin Afghanistan in the mid-1990’s, and the miseries they imposed on the Afghan people until their overthrow after 9/11; a period of many months in Yemen, before and after the October 2000 attack by a bomb-laden skiff that killed 17 sailors on the USS Cole, the last major al Qaeda attack before the Twin Towers; after 9/11, assignment to Pakistan, and later Afghanistan, during the campaign to topple the Taliban and its aftermath; from there, on to Iraq for five years during the run-up to the invasion of 2003, and through the years of insurgency and civil conflict that followed.

http://newageislam.com/military-power-only-one-of-the-many-tools-to-deal-with-islamic-radicalization/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/2409

How to Save Afghanistan, War on Terror, NewAgeIslam.com

War on Terror

How to Save Afghanistan

By RORY STEWART / KABUL

But terrorism and insurgency are only part of what's going wrong in Afghanistan. In 2002, I walked safely along the length of the road between Herat and Obey in western Afghanistan. Recently aid workers were carjacked on that road, and it is now considered too dangerous for aid agencies, effectively closing the main access to the central regions of the country. In provinces close to Kabul, such as Wardak, Ghazni and Logar, which were easy to visit two years ago, foreigners are regularly attacked and girls' schools burned at will. Afghanistan produces 92% of the world's opium (used to make heroin) and 35% of its cannabis and has a flourishing trade in looted antiquities. In a vicious cycle, narcotics, corruption and the absence of law and order are rotting the heart of the government and crippling the economy. Despite massive Western investment, Afghanistan is close to being a failed state.

http://newageislam.com/how-to-save-afghanistan/war-on-terror/d/365

In a national crisis, parties might try to think beyond elections,

Islam and Politics

In a national crisis, parties might try to think beyond elections

Politics and Play: THE FRUIT OF TAKING SIDES

By Ramachandra Guha

The boycott of Vajpayee’s Srinagar speech was a shocking display of political partisanship. For the speaker was speaking as the prime minister of India, not as the representative of a particular political formation. In asking their legislators to behave as they did, the Congress bosses displayed a pettiness unworthy of the history of that once great party. The act also manifested a cavalier disregard of the national interest. From the early Nineties, the Kashmir Valley had been in the grip of a popular insurgency. After a decade of very intense protests, the tempers had cooled somewhat. The tourists had begun returning to Kashmir. An election had been held, with a voter turn-out of 44 per cent, commendably high in the circumstances. The prime minister’s visit was a further signal of, as it were, ‘normalcy’. Constitutional propriety demanded that when the head of the Union government came visiting, the elected functionaries of the state government turned out to hear him. Now, more than ever, the politicians of India needed unitedly, and across party lines, to reach out to the people of Kashmir. Sadly, perhaps even tragically, they could not.

http://newageislam.com/in-a-national-crisis,-parties-might-try-to-think-beyond-elections/islam-and-politics/d/629